Pages

Saturday, 12 July 2014

The Pig And The Villain

I completed two more vehicles for Machinas last week, but today was the first chance I've had to take pictures of them.

First War Pig, a large buggy armed with a gatling.

I didn't do too much to this vehicle; mesh on the windows and a piece of sprue on the bonnet to create some kind of engine gubbins and to break up the lines a little. The vehicle came with the gun. Actually it came with a gun on both sides, but I removed one and added it to another vehicle.

The other new vehicle is a little siller, although I have modified the concept to fit in with the world of Machinas.

The original vehicle is, of course, the Batmobile from the 1989 movie.

For the look and colours, though, I was inspired by a vehicle from a certain race-related cartoon series from the 1960s

The driver may look familiar, and I'm sure his green (mutant) dog will ...

Both of the cars made their debut in a game I played this afternoon. War Pig is fairly conventional. but for Dick and his doggy chum I tried out a couple of new traits. The first was Nitro, which allows a car to gain a hefty bonus in auto-successes when passing on a straight, but only once per game. The second is a new driver signature, Saboteur. This is linked to the random events table; if you have Saboteur and you roll a '5' on the table, then you can pick another car in the race and immediately have it make an Out of Control check. However you can only do this to a given car once per game. It got used once. Dick was in second place and got the roll of '5', choosing the lead car to make the roll. This had a low Tech and no bonus dice, so, inevitably, failed it, becoming a wreck. In Machinas, cars that wreck flip back one space - in this case right on top of Dick's lovely purple car wrecking him as well*.

As the smoking wrecks were towed from the track, you caould hear a snivelling voice say "Drat. And double-drat!"

*They both almost took out the car I was driving as well, but I survived, and it gave me the lead. I still didn't win the race.

Saboteur is erratic. In a three lap race with six cars, the driver got to use it on all five of them at some stage, but only caused one driver to drop back one place. In another, four-lap, race it came up once, but the target failed its control roll and crashed.

Saving Nitro until right at the end is a possible use, but leaving things until the very last minute isn't always the best strategy, as your final run can be blocked.

The Stronghold Rebuilt

Officially a blog about 'Hordes Of The Things', the excellent fast-play fantasy miniatures rules from WRG. But expect minor, and not so minor diversions into other games as well, as my grasshopper-like mind leaps from one cool thing to another.

Allegedly worse than Hitler and more bigoted than The Miniatures Page. Actually not.